Hey old sport, The Great Gatsby was made into an NES game

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel, The Great Gatsby, was just made into an NES-style game. The key part is that the game is playable, for free, right now. If you are a fan of the book you have to try it. If you aren’t, but happen to be a fan of 8-bit games, you’ll like it too… though you should take some time to reconsider your choice of reading materials.

You play as Nick Caraway, the book’s protagonist, and you run around the scenes of the book (like Gatsby’s party and the Valley of Ashes) using your bowler hat like a boomerang, taking out waiters, tommygunners, flappers, and other enemies from the era. It’s good, simple fun just as you’d expect from an NES game.

The game even has a little bit of mystery behind it, or at least the developer wanted it to seem that way. If you check out the About page you’ll see that the cartridge was found at a yard sale and it was originally going to be a Japanese game called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari”. The story goes that the game was never released but he managed to track down a magazine ad from 1990 (below) and part of the instruction manual was with the game.

Sure, none of it is true, but nice work on adding some background to complete a cool project.